I can see you now, rolling your eyes, making that annoying clicking sound with your tongue. Thinking you still know better than me. Thinking I’m exaggerating. I’m just putting on a show.

You only saw me as a girl.

You knew the crumbling avalanche. You knew the broken backbone, begging you to see her as whole. You knew pieces, jagged and scattered across the kitchen floor.

I can’t pretend those elements don’t still exist within me. Some things will never change.

But for the most part, I did. I changed.

And this woman I’ve become, this symbol of strength and survival, is someone you don’t know. Don’t pretend to. Don’t come crawling and clawing your way into a life I’ve constructed without you. I had to do this. I had to learn all over again. You tore me down until I was nothing more than a skeleton.

But from dirt flowers grow. So as dirty as you made me feel, as low and pitiful, I still blossomed.

I’m not your project. I made my damn self.

You don’t know me now. Maybe you never did.